The first discovery of this sort was made in 1851 when the workers in one of the Massachusetts mines extracted a zinc silver-incrusted vase from a block of unmined coal which dated all the way back to the Cambrian era which was approximately 500 million years ago.

Goes along with my theory that there was a very advanced civilization on earth prior to our being. They wern't aliens they were people living on earth.They were wiped out by whatever and a few survived, which repopulated the earth.I have no proof of this except for the voices in my head and the dreams I had when I was using Chantix.

1) The only info coming out of Russia that I won't automatically presume is bogus is vehiclecam video showing cool accidents and road rage incidents. Some goofy behavior is just too goofy to have been faked.

2) A 300 million year old *gear* is proof of UFOs? If aliens are puttering around in steampunk flying saucers no wonder Jeff Goldblum was able to infect them with a cross-system virus.

3) And on a serious note, if we actually did find truly old artifacts I'd be more inclined to believe them relics of a previously-undiscovered intelligence native to earth, not aliens. Its not wholly out of bounds to speculate some dinosaur species having shot up in intelligence in relatively short time (geologically speaking), left behind some metalwork, then went extinct before able to leave too much evidence for us. Highly unlikely? Sure. But more likely than steampunk aliens is all I'm sayin'.

The reference to the silver vase which was found in Massachusetts seems to be a bit garbled but I've seen the story before and have even seen a photo of the anomalous vase in question. The surface is decorated with intaglio, a type of carving into the surface, which produces counter-relief. It is typical of work done in the Middle East. The vase looks like nothing so much as a Massachusett traveller's souvenir of the Holy Land.

There was a house on the site before the coal was mined, IIRC.

Many of these finds were pranks played by coal miners on one another. They would hide a modern six-pence or a nail or some other object in the coal for another miner to find. Others might be the result of small objects being carried into the coal bed by natural processes, such as digging animals. Darwin was well aware, for example, that objects on the ground tend to get carried to the lowest level excavated by earth worms and other diggers and thus get jumbled together at the interface between the soil and the sub-soil.

The illustration seems to be of a lump of anthracite with "tooth" marks on almost crystal-like planes jumbled in it's structure. Without a photo of the object found, it is hard to speculate on its provenance, but such objects have been found as long as there has been coal-miners. Some of them are natural (some of the "nails"), some of them are hoaxes or jokes, and very few of them consist of anything manufactured beyond the means of the epoch in which they were found, if any. If an aluminum gear had been found in 1800, before aluminum smelting was commercalized, it would have been a wonder indeed. In 2012, it is not.

Terry Pratchett wrote an early SF comedy novel called Strata which is a prequel in some ways to the Discworld series. In the novel, a company builds worlds for colonization. The men and women who operate the giant machines that lay down the planetary crust are tempted to include anomalies to amaze and confuse the descendans of the colonists--bizarre out-of-place fossils, UFOs, and finds like these--anomalies in coal beds.

When found out, they are fired, which is harsh punishment because they are not paid in currency but in life-extending treatments which are the hardest currency in the galaxy.

Pratchett borrowed and parodied these ideas from the SF he read as a youth and young adult--authors including Larry Niven, whose Ringworld is the obvous ancestor of Discworld. The idea of Ringworld is borrowed from the great thinker, Dyson, who suggested that advanced alien civilizations could transform some of the larger and useless gas plants into a sphere around their sun, thus creating a virtually endless surface for colonization rather than colonizing planets and moons. Ringworld has a circumferance of 600,000,000 kilometres and a width of 1,000,000 kilometres, making it so giant that the builders were able to include multiple maps of the Earth, Mars, and other inhabited worlds.

This structure is named a Dyson Sphere after Dyson (who is not the same Dyson who invented the unusually hand dryer, vacuum, and fans sold under his name). Ring World would be a Dyson Ring, and Discworld is just a model of an ancient Indian concept of the Earth as a flat table top resting on the backs of four elephants, standing on a sea turtle swimming through space.

Seeing as none of the anomalies have any technology that is beyond the power of contemporaries, I assume they are all hoaxes or misidentifications, the simplest explanation in accordance with Occam's Razor. It would be odd indeed if something were found that was really impossible to make or find in a curiosity shop. That would truly be out of place.

cretinbob:Quantum Apostrophe: It grows that shape just the same in nature, or do you think it was molded that way?

No. The crystals are grown under laboratory conditions not found in nature.

From what I understand, bismuth can be found elementally in nature. It just grows that way the same way elemental tin likes to grow whiskers by itself. I'm just saying it's possible for stuff to look man made when in reality it's just nature doing its thing. Those jagged edges and pyramidal steps of the bismuth crystals is unusual. Suppose one, just one of these guys grew next to a bit of coal. I dunno. It's more likely than an ancient civilization on Earth and even more likely than UFOs.